Lauren Tan

Tan started a career in tech as a UI designer, then, in Tan's own words, found the allure of learning to bring those designs to life too enticing. Through the mid-2010s Tan wrote extensively about Ember.js and Elixir, and in June 2016 introduced ember-changeset, an Ember addon that brings the idea of Ecto changesets into Ember.js, together with a companion addon, ember-changeset-validations.1517

Tan went on to serve as an engineering manager at Netflix and then as a software engineer at Facebook. Along the way Tan gave more than 15 conference talks on TypeScript, JavaScript, React, GraphQL, Elixir and Phoenix, microservices, and engineering leadership, at events from EmberConf and ElixirConf to React Rally, dotJS in Paris, and TSConf, including a 2018 RubyConf talk on building Netflix's studio software. Tan's GitHub also hosts hiring-without-whiteboards, a list of companies and teams that favor interviews resembling day-to-day work over whiteboard trivia.151618

In March 2023 Tan co-authored a React Labs update describing React Forget, an optimizing compiler that makes plain JavaScript in React components automatically reactive, which the team had begun using in production in limited areas at Meta. The React team credits Tan, with Joe Savona, Sathya Gunasekaran, and Mofei Zhang, with the compiler's first rewrite, which moved its architecture to a Control Flow Graph based High-Level Intermediate Representation.149

At React Conf 2024 Tan presented the State of React and a talk titled "Forget About Memo." That October Tan wrote the React Compiler Beta announcement, which opened the React Compiler Working Group to everyone and added support for apps on React 17 and later.1110

On October 7, 2025, Tan, Savona, and Zhang announced React Compiler v1.0, the first stable release, which the team describes as battle-tested at Meta and which works with both React and React Native. Tan announced the release in the Day 1 keynote of React Conf 2025.91213

Tan's GitHub profile describes Tan as a software engineer at xai-org, the GitHub organization of SpaceXAI, and as part of the React Compiler core team. React's team page lists Tan among its working group members as an engineer at Cursor, in the Compiler group. Cursor was acquired by SpaceX on August 14, 2026, and SpaceXSI says Cursor became part of SpaceXSI that day.123478

Tan also builds tools for AI coding agents. Tan wrote pstack, a plugin in Cursor's official plugins repository that aims to help developers write less but higher-quality code, and publishes noodle, an open-source Go project for orchestrating agents using skills. Cursor listed Tan, as a Member of Technical Staff, among the Main Stage speakers at its Compile London event, with a talk titled "I Shipped 2,000 PRs Last Month."19202156